Newsletter

Letter: Health care compact serves states

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger made some comments regarding the Health Care Compact that are erroneous and must be corrected.

The Health Care Compact, which I support and which is before the Legislature, is an interstate compact that transfers authority, responsibility and control of federal health care funding from the federal government to member states. It reverses the decades-long centralization of power over health care and gives Kansas the opportunity to control its own health care system. It also requires the federal government to continue providing a proportional share of federal health care dollars to the member states.

Commissioner Praeger erroneously stated that the Legislature could take funds for Medicare and other health programs and spend them on other programs.

That is false. The Health Care Compact explicitly states federal health care dollars must be spent only on health care. They cannot be siphoned off to fund other programs.

If Medicare beneficiaries want to protect public funding of their health care, Obamacare is the problem, not the solution. Obamacare cuts more than $700 billion from Medicare to pay for Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies.

Kansas can use the Health Care Compact to shield Medicare from the disaster of Obamacare. Consider that if the Health Care Compact had been active in 2013, funding for health care in our state would have been 1.4 percent higher than actual federal health care expenditures.

The time has come for Kansas to join the movement to bring health care back to the states. The Health Care Compact is the best way for our state to protect all our citizens. Working with other states, we can repeal the Obamacare provisions that have caused health insurance costs to skyrocket, we can better allocate the public dollars that are available, and we can restore the constitutional framework of our country.